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From the Editor: New Year, New Series, New Life! |
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To those who are unfamiliar with the Ba Sing Se Times, this is a free-for-all submission system that truly relies on you to keep publishing. If you're anything like me, you also wouldn't mind being part of a fancy blog feature on Avatar Wiki's home page just for submitting a sophisticated ramble in style! See those huge, obvious buttons above me? One click is all it takes for your journey to glorified publishing to begin... We WILL see you in our article submission office. We will. You know you want to. |
Welcome to 2024, Avatar Wiki!
This is the year all of us have been waiting for; the dawn of the live-action era and more! Netflix's series is set to be released but a month from now, and the hype is just getting started. While we wait, however, we present you the first Ba Sing Se Times of 2024 and the beautiful fandom that fills its contents. We'd also like to extend a special thank you to Janet Varney for answering more fan interview questions and giving her wonderful insight into her role in the Avatar series as always!
Happy New year, and may Avatar dominate 2024.
Get to reading, folks!
The questions below were selected from the Avatar Wiki community in this post. A million thanks to Janet for taking the time to share her insight with us!
What is your favorite Korra battle scene and the change that it brought to the world?
If you weren't Korra’s VA, which character(s) in the show would you want to voice instead?
Who would you pick as Korra’s VA if it wasn’t you?
What is something you have come to appreciate more about the original series while rewatching it for the podcast?
How are you feeling about talking about Korra on Braving the Elements? Does it feel different than talking about ATLA?
What is the process of planning and recording episodes like?
Did you know about the spiritual arc that Korra was going to have in Season 4, or when and how did you learn about her bisexuality during production?
How do you think Korra grew from her relationship with Mako and the lessons she learned that contributed to a healthy relationship with Asami?
Do you miss and enjoy voicing Korra for as long as you have?
Kia ora and Happy Holidays Avatar Wiki!
We at the BSST just wanted to give a huge thank you to everyone who has submitted articles this year and in previous ones. We truly appreciate it and couldn't have published without all your input! As we head into the new year, we really want to keep up the momentum with publishing (and maybe even increase how many we publish per year), and to do that, we're putting out a call for articles to keep the wheels of the BSST churning. More articles means more issues, and who doesn't want that? So why write an article? It can be pretty fulfilling. With the BSST you have a platform to voice your theories about the Avatar world, share what you love about the series (or dislike), review Avatar content and share your thoughts, promote fan works and highlight awesome projects going on. The list is endless! And if you do write an article for us, Minnichi will be happy with you. Which is much better than being on her bad side... Some of you may have read this far and thought, "Flameo! I'll write an article... about what?" And if that's you, then fear not! Here are just a few ideas for articles listed below. Some of these are topics yet to be covered, and others might just spark some inspiration.
Did you know...
Although we don't have strict dates in the Avatar series, New Year's Day would've been around the halfway point of the first season!
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Well, the reason Aang couldn't control the Avatar State is often misunderstood and conflated with its status as a survival mechanism. People sometimes call that "the berserker Avatar State," but there is no second type of Avatar State, there's only continuous & non-continuous use of its power. The "berserker state" is a completely made-up rule caused by misunderstanding Aang's situation with the Avatar State. The reason he went berserk was that he couldn't control it & became a vessel for the collective will of his various lives. Katara's actions would cause him to remember himself & literally come to his senses, but he wasn't yet able to control the Avatar State in that frame of mind because his problem was caused by him viewing Avatarhood, & especially the State, as something separate to himself & rejecting it. Until he got over that mental block, Aang as an individual & the Avatar State could not coexist. He hasn't had that problem since the end of Sozin's Comet because he finally accepted that all of the Avatar powers are his own to control. Korra never had this problem. If anything, she had the opposite problem, being unable to distinguish between Her Power & Her Self. More on that later, but for now, the point is that the reason Korra could control the Avatar State is that she always embraced it. If that's the case, you might ask how she could be forced into it by Zaheer's poison, & the reason is that being unable to control the Avatar State & being forced into it automatically are separate phenomena. We've already covered the former, but the latter happens as a result of survival instinct. Book 3: Change shows it cannot triggered by the past lives because Korra doesn't have that connection anymore. It also wasn't done by Raava: If it were, they would argue about it, Korra saying something along the lines of "Why are you doing this?" The reason that doesn't happen is it's all Korra, it's just her survival instinct winning out against her attempt at self-sacrifice. She knows that, & that's why she never blames Raava for it. In fact, Korra's rage & single-minded attempt to kill Zaheer is often used as an example of this so-called "berserker state," which is very odd to me because Korra literally told the Red Lotus that she intended to kill them all for what they did to her, especially (seemingly) killing her father. She wasn't being mind controlled, she was just scared, in fight-or-flight mode, & above all, pissed.
Now, as we all know, this battle left a lasting impact on Korra. For several years, she couldn't even go into the Avatar State, & she even saw visions of herself from that battle as a manifestation of her fears. When she extracts the remaining poison from her body, she's able to go into the Avatar State, but something still isn't quite right, leading to her PTSD flare-up against Kuvira & needing to be rescued. That's when she decided to confront Zaheer, leading to his controversial line of "blaming me is a crutch to make you feel better, but it's not helping." This line is the epitome of "he's out of line, but he's right:" Korra THINKS she lost control, but that ISN'T true. Zaheer attacked her, yes, but he's been chained underground ever since. He has no control over Korra's ruminations. By telling herself it's Zaheer's fault, she feels less guilty for not being able to overcome her symptoms, but the problem with that is that shifting the locus of control away from herself causes learned helplessness, a belief that she cannot do anything to get better because she is not in control. This is also why removing the poison didn't fully restore her abilities. While it probably wasn't helping, she was still stuck in this mindset of if some external factor was removed, it would solve all of her problems without her having to confront them. It was progress when she removed it of her own free will, but blaming her situation on the lingering poison & pretending her insecurities didn't exist could only get her so far. She needed to accept what happened & not let it define her. Only by deciding to do that could she really begin to heal psychologically, not by undoing what happened, she is forever changed by the event, but by managing that change & leveraging it into positive action. By this, I mean she uses her trauma as a learning experience. For her, the conclusion was that it was something she needed to experience in order to better understand the suffering of others. That doesn't need to be the takeaway, it just needs to be something that helps her process what happened & inspires her to self-improve going forward. The right conclusion for Korra is not the right conclusion for everyone, nor is the show saying it is. In any case, the reason she sees her fears as herself in the Avatar State is the same reason she avoids going back to Republic City or telling anyone she's the Avatar. It's the same thing Toph noticed: She's afraid of going back to being the Avatar because she thinks it means she'll fail &/or get hurt. She is afraid of what has been & might be again. It IS because she was helpless and vulnerable, but NOT because she was mind controlled. That's why she eventually sees her own Avatar State face on Kuvira: The show is desperately trying to convince us that Kuvira is like Korra's past self, that she's someone who is acting out of hurt & insecurity, but ultimately of her own free will.
So, why does all of this happen in the first place? Well, as established way back near the beginning of this post, Korra had an unhealthy image of herself. She was unable to distinguish between herself as a person & her role as the Avatar. Moreover, she defined the Avatar by power. This means that any attack on her power was seen as an attack on herself, & a loss of power was a loss of herself. Her conflicts with Amon & Unalaq were just as much about feeling like she was nothing & nobody without her powers as they were slugfest with some angry wet dudes. I've described her fight with Zaheer as "the straw that broke the camel's back, the last piece of this cumulative effect that brought everything up to the surface." This gets at what Toph meant by how she was "still fighting those old battles," but it doesn't entirely do it justice. Korra had lost a lot, but she was never weakened for so long & never saw people getting on without her. Her 3 years of recovery made her think she wasn't needed & that, along with the violence she experienced, devastated her. This is what Toph was trying to tell her about the world not needing her; the world will always go on no matter what happens, she can't expect it to stop for her. The same idea is expressed more eloquently by Iroh: "Pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source. The antidote to shame is true humility." Korra's shame was a direct result of her arrogance, & it could only be solved by being humble, accepting that she wasn't the center of the world & trying to truly understand other people, even if they were her enemies. She doesn't fully understand this at the time, & it's often said that going to the Spirit World "just magically fixed her problem," but it's the other way around: Her distorted mentality is what was keeping her OUT of the Spirit World. Whenever she would try to meditate, she would just see Zaheer trying to kill her, she couldn't get past that, but she needed to let go of her fear in order to connect with her spiritual awareness.
Korra & Aang actually have something in common in that their journeys involve developing a healthier understanding of the connection between themselves, their powers, & their duties, but the way that problem manifests is unique to each of them. Where Aang saw his powers & duties as something imposed on him, Korra allowed them to consume her, to the point where she didn't even know who she was if she couldn't exert control as the Avatar. Both are a lesson in why children are not told that they're the Avatar: They're not ready to handle it, & it leads to unhealthy psychological development, but unfortunately, neither had the luxury of not knowing. The bite out of the silver sandwich, though, is that people are adaptable, & unhealthy attitudes that have been learned can be unlearned. It may be a painful process, plagued by fear & self-doubt, but that doesn't mean it's not worth doing. So, that's going to do it for this post. It was a bit of a chunky one, but I had a lot of ground to cover. Hopefully, that shed light on some things, & you can let me know what you think in the comments. See you there. |
Hello Avatar Wiki! Bomochu here with another fanon review to round off the year! Thanks again for your patience General B.H. as I've taken my time to put together the best review I can! Today I'll be reviewing Avatar: Macai's Journey, the debut fanon from General B.H.. Many users on the wiki have probably seen AMJ, and I definitely have to give General B.H. kudos for finishing his story. AMJ tells the story of Macai, a young firebender recruited into the Fire Nation military, and his journey as he goes out to serve his nation but is faced with the harsh realities of war. Bear in mind this review will contain spoilers as I like to give the most specific advice that I can. But without further ado, let's see how AMJ did with the scores, shall we?
Overall Score: 6.27/10 Conclusion: Avatar: Macai's Journey has the backbone of a great story. Most of my advice comes down to execution, and always being mindful of the reader experience. Making things less bogged down with unnecessary description and opting for the more subtle language and subtext to explain things, focusing on tone and character voice, could all make the story even better. With that said, AMJ has a number of readers and views, and anyone who enjoys adventure stories set in the time of AtLA will find this fanon a treat. Thank you for your patience with this review General B.H! I hope that some of the comments made are helpful. And if you'd like your own review or author interview then check out the FRRS today!
Check out some of the latest fanart from our Wiki and Discord community!
Original Artwork by Sam Lee Wins (Discord) [1] |
As with all stories, you need something to write about, but horror can be particularly tricky because it also has to be something scary. This can be a challenge as you find yourself thinking “and then a monster popped out;” it’s not very original and it’s hard to make the monster seem scary to someone who can’t see it in your mind like you do. But it might actually not be as hard as it first seems. What you might not know is I actually spend more time reading horror stories on places like r/nosleep than I do reading fanfiction, and common advice given there is to think of an everyday scenario and figure out how you might make it scary. For instance, instead of seeing a beautiful forest to hike through, think about what could be hiding in a far-off, darkened cluster of trees and what happens if you can’t find your way out and you keep hearing something rustling behind you. Other sources of potential inspiration include nightmares, scary personal experiences, and true crime stories. For Avatar, we’re going to modify this brainstorming session a little bit. That advice can all still work, but you also want the subject to be Avatar related. If you look at what Avatar does when it incorporates horror, it actually takes the same basic advice and puts an Avatar-themed spin on it. The police seem pretty normal, right? Well, what if they were a secret police that lurked in the shadows and, if you were taken by them, you were never seen again? Suddenly scary. Puppets seem innocent enough, right? Well, what if a waterbender used her powers on the water in your body to use YOU as a puppet? Blood-curdling. But we don’t want to just retell those stories, so I go a step further by putting a spin on their spin. For example, in "Koh's Quarry" I envision Koh as almost like a slasher monster, with the protagonist desperately trying to escape from him as his mocking laughter echoes from behind. In the sequel, "Flight of Koh's Quarry, the horror comes not just from Koh but also from the fact that the explorers featured therein don’t trust each other and might betray each other at a moment’s notice. For one more example, in "Spirit Photography, a dark spirit stalks the night like a ghost, complete with eerie wailing, and an additional wrinkle comes when it turns out it’s being worshipped by a cult that wants to sacrifice humans to it. As with any other type of fanfiction, we’re taking the basic idea presented by the canon and building on it. So, you might consider how a bloodbender could imitate witchcraft, what a person trapped in the Fog of Lost Souls might experience, or any other combination of a scary idea and an Avatar theme.  But knowing is only half the battle. Remember how I said horror is a learning curve? I never thought that horror would be one of my favorite genres to write because, when I first tried, the result was absolutely dreadful (but not in the way you want it to be). My idea was that a man was going to lose his mind and murder his wife, which I explained by a Cthulhu-like entity. In practice, however, it ended up not making any sense. The protagonist just spouted gibberish before seemingly killing his wife for no reason. One reason for this is that I was in way too much of a hurry to make scary things happen. What I hadn’t realized is that most of the fear of a monster attack, for instance, comes not from the attack itself but from the buildup. Alfred Hitchcock gives a famous example of how, if he shows a bomb with a timer ticking away under the table while the characters are talking about baseball, you spend the whole conversation frantically hoping they’ll notice the bomb and escape. This frays your nerves, causing you to dread what’s coming next. So, in my later horror stories, I really tried to slow down. If you’ve ever heard of the rule of three, that’s the idea that you should introduce something (the bomb), remind the audience of it later in the story (such as by cutting back to it), and then pay it off (the explosion). In horror, that’s the bare minimum: I really try to remind the audience of the danger at least two or three times, generally with increasing intensity, before paying it off. For example, in Koh’s Quarry, throughout the story, the protagonist hears Koh laughing, threatening to take his face, sees his reflection on the water, and glimpses him in the trees. This doesn’t all happen one after the other, but instead is broken up by descriptions of him running away or even finding momentary safety and plotting his next move. The suspense is that you know Koh is lurking somewhere nearby, and you don’t know when he’s going to pop up next, but you do know that, if he pops up in front of the character, it’s probably all over for him. It was very important to build that up because, if he just turns around and sees Koh’s face, that’s anticlimactic. An important part of building suspense is imagery. These are words and phrases that invoke the senses. Does your character hear a grating cackle on the wind? Does she feel the freezing air shredding her lungs? Does she smell a putrid stench? Does she taste a sweet, coppery flavor after a blow to the jaw knocks her tooth loose? Is the darkness so thick that she can’t see the creature she’s nose-to-nose with, except for her reflection in its eyes? Notice that I’m often combining different imagery words and I’m deliberately choosing them to invoke a sense of discomfort. It’s not merely a laugh, it’s a cackle, like a witch, and it’s also grating, as if a cheese grater was scraped across your ears. This not only gets the reader inside your character’s head, which is likely a bad place to be if they’re being hunted by a spirit or paralyzed by a crazy bloodbender, but it also contributes to a growing feeling of “wrongness,” like something bad is just bound to happen. You can also subtly communicate this through your narration. For instance, perhaps you want to describe a character as having made a foolish mistake. You know what another way to say that is? A grave mistake. This makes the reader think “gravestone,” and therefore “death.” It’s possible that nothing bad has even happened in the story yet, but you’re already laying the groundwork for the reader to get in the mood. If you look back through this article, you can see examples of this technique, such as the phrase “frays your nerves” instead of something more neutral, like “causes you to worry.” Just remember the point about suspense: You want to pace out your story, not constantly hammer your audience over the head with a long string of imagery--there gets to be a point where there’s just too much description. This is all part of establishing tone, and you might be expecting me to say that your tone should be serious and melancholy, but that’s actually not true. One of the most eye-opening experiences for me in this genre was when I read the book “John Dies At The End.” It’s written by a former Cracked writer and that shows in the style, how the narrator often makes very juvenile jokes. However, it’s unmistakably a horror story, and a genuinely chilling one at that, with people being abducted, eaten alive by creatures from another reality, and possessed by demonic entities beyond their understanding. What this taught me is that there are actually many different ways to write a horror story. Sure, it can be serious, brooding, slow, and sad; that’s a perfectly valid way to write a story. But it can also, surprisingly enough, be funny. Humor can be a way of taking your audience off-guard before the scary thing happens, so long as you know when to use it. As a rule of thumb, a joke shouldn’t be out of nowhere in an otherwise unfunny story and there should be a little time to cool down between the joke and the scare. This is less obvious with my Avatar stories, as opposed to my nosleep ones, but you can see some signs of subtle, dry humor in “Koh’s Quarry.” After a life-and-death struggle where the narrator believes he’s being drowned by the titular spirit, it turns out he just got caught in a log. He can’t help but have a good laugh at the absurdity of this, which means he isn’t expecting the real Koh to show up, which therefore means it’s the perfect time for Koh to show up. You can use different tones to establish the mood of your story and give it a memorable voice. On r/nosleep, stories are generally written in first-person, so that’s an opportunity to distinguish the narrator’s character. Is the person telling the story a good writer? Is he sarcastic? Does he frighten easily and, if he doesn’t, does that put him in more danger? On the wiki, I more often use third person omniscient narration, so I lean toward giving the tales a “storybook” quality, but sometimes I buck that trend. For instance, in "Flight of Koh’s Quarry," what at first seems like a standard all-knowing narrator keeps phrasing the characters’ feelings as guesses. This gives the subtle indication that they’re actually being watched and raises obvious the questions “by who or what,” “why are they being watched,” and “what is the watcher going to do?” As you might guess, this leads to a twist ending. This is very common in horror stories, but not always necessary; it’s more about if your payoff was shocking enough to be worth the time building up suspense. While I don’t quite classify it as horror, I wrote Adharma Now, a “What If” story starring Ozai after he won the war, just hammering in that everyone was doomed because of how he destroyed the environment, and there’s no last-minute rescue, it’s just a story of a man being completely broken as everything around him is ruined and he knows he can’t take it back. That’s frightening enough without it turning out that he was in a coma the whole time or it was actually Aang who destroyed the world for some reason. I’m sure there are important points I haven’t made. After all, like I said at the start, horror is a genre with a steep learning curve and I am describing tricks that I learned along the way. I also barely touch on how there are a lot of subgenres in horror, like slasher, paranormal, body, and so on. Still, I hope this summary of my experiences will help anyone interested in writing Avatar horror, or even just horror in general, but I also welcome feedback. Of course, a big part of learning is experience, and going out to experience the horror stories written by others definitely helped me to identify the shortcomings I could improve in my own. To be clear, that’s not a matter of simply doing what everyone else is doing: There are a lot of r/nosleep stories that I really don’t like, but identifying why I like some stories and not others helped me to develop my own sense of style. This can even go beyond the basics of the genre, like a realization that you prefer spiritual horror or that you want to write stories inspired by culturally-authentic urban legends. There really is no substitute for experience.
But I wanted to highlight this fanon in the issue since I recently came across the author notes of the original work and thought it was worth sharing. You see, the webcomic is an adaptation of a work by the same name on Fanfiction.net, written by Orga. It was actually started way back in 2007, and after a ten year hiatus, Orga returned to finish the story at the end of 2022. I love how even after fifteen years since it's beginning, there are still fans in the reviews sharing their love for the story. The webcomic by Rocket is still ongoing, with a set of images posted this month a few weeks ago. I've finished all the webcomic chapters thus far and have started the original story, and I have to say, both are very compelling and engaging to read through. Orga's writing style really lends itself to the premise, and the artwork by Rocket beautifully captures iconic moments from the story. So what is Distorted Reality about? In the 'canon' world, Aang and Team Avatar suffer an incredible loss at the hands of Princess Azula. Tired, and defeated, Aang tried to restore his Avatar State in order to crush Fire Lord Ozai and Princess Azula. But when he contacts his past lives for advice on how to restore his ability, Yangchen tells him he has to save another world in order to save his own. Only in this world, Aang isn't found in an iceberg but a volcano. And it isn't Katara and Sokka who find him, but two Fire Nation children from a small village; Zuko and Azula. With the world at war with the Water Nation, Aang soon learns that this world is similar to his own, yet distorted, and opposite at times. His journey becomes about learning to trust Azula as his companion, and trying to change the outcome of this world's war. I think alternate reality fanworks can really tap into an interesting 'what if?' theme that canon works can't really do (since canon works are obviously the original). Aang has this hatred and anger towards Princess Azula in his own world, but if the roles were reversed, would it still be justified? These are just some of the themes explored throughout the story, and I'd definitely recommend checking it out. Have a read of the synopsis below!
Distorted Reality
Plot Synopsis After losing Ba Sing Se to Azula, Aang and the others continue to fight an increasingly hopeless battle against the Fire Nation. When Aang is finally able to contact his past lives again, many friends have been lost, and Aang is left so embittered that the past Avatars decide, in order to help Aang regain his sense of compassion, to send him to another world to relive the events leading up to the catastrophe again. Only he finds that this time he must fight alongside Zuko and Azula for the war-torn Fire Nation Islands, against the savage Water Tribes. Check out the Avatar Wiki main page here for links to the original story and webcomic chapters!
Here you'll find the latest fanon news and requests from the community. If you'd like any requests or offers listed then contact one of the BSST staff. You can also visit the FRRS for an interview or technical review, or the Fanonbenders for help.
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